New year, new purposes

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been posting here regularly, for several reasons. One is that I’ve been even more preoccupied than usual for a year or so; my being in a usually-long-distance relationship has generally meant that my communication efforts are channelled elsewhere than blogging. On top of that, what posting I’ve been doing has generally been elsewhere in a more private space, where I can feel freer when it comes to, say, complaining about my job and aspects thereof.

However, given that this space is still here, I feel a vague onus to do something useful (or at least, hopefully, interesting) with it. By happy coincidence, I’ve been thinking recently about taking a couple of my hobbies a little more seriously of late. These two great tastes taste great together in the following way: I’m going to start using this space as my notebook for hobby-related activities.

What does hobby-related mean? It means that I’m probably not going to spend a lot of time talking about my research or my teaching, since those fall very firmly within the category of my real job. I’m also not going to talk much about truly personal things, since as mentioned above I have an elsewhere for those. That leaves, well, everything else. Music. Food and drink, with particular emphasis on baking bread. Theatre, sometimes. If I’m particularly affected (or enraged) by a book, movie, or TV show then that might show up here as well.

As an experiment, I’ve also chosen to turn comments on here, on the off-chance that there’s anyone who hasn’t deleted this blog from their RSS feed already. If you’re reading this, then great! Feel free to let me know.